For editors & publishers
Make the size of something
make sense.
Just How Big? builds sourced, to-scale comparisons of animals, objects, buildings, space and the microscopic world. If you are writing about something whose size is difficult to picture, give your reader something familiar to put beside it.
Existing visuals, interactive embeds, source notes and bespoke comparisons are available for editorial use.A useful visual, not another press release
Use the bit that helps your story.
You do not need to republish a Just How Big? article. Use a comparison as a graphic, embed the interactive version, ask for an alternative crop, or use the measurements and sources as a starting point for your own reporting.
If the exact comparison does not exist yet, ask. A new discovery, unusually large object or strange measurement is often much easier to understand once it is placed beside something ordinary.
Original graphics
Clean comparison artwork for web or print, with the scale and measurement context kept intact.
Interactive embeds
Responsive comparisons that can sit inside an article and let readers inspect the scale for themselves.
Sources & method notes
The measurements, assumptions and source trail behind the visual, including where a figure is illustrative rather than universal.
Bespoke comparisons
Need to explain a size that has just appeared in the news? We can build a comparison around the object your readers already understand.
Ready-made story ideas
Five places to start.
These stories show the sort of visual treatment Just How Big? can provide. They can be used as references, adapted for a publication, or broken apart into individual editorial graphics.
Story idea
The true size of a blue whale
Two buses, fourteen human heights and an orca that suddenly looks small.
A blue whale is easy to recognise and surprisingly hard to picture at full scale. This story uses a 25-metre adult example beside two double-decker buses, a 1.75-metre person and a seven-metre orca, turning a familiar animal into a sequence of measurements readers can actually feel.
Read the whale story →Available comparisons
bus vs blue whale
human vs blue whale
orca vs blue whale
Story idea
How small can a star get?
Some stars are about the size of a planet. The remains of others could fit across a city.
Start with the Sun, shrink to a red dwarf, then keep going into stellar remnants. The visual sequence moves from the Sun and Proxima Centauri to an Earth-sized white dwarf and a neutron-star example only 20 kilometres across, while keeping the important distinction between a living star and what a star can leave behind.
Read the star story →Available comparisons
sun vs proxima centauri
earth vs white dwarf
earth vs neutron star
Story idea
The invisible world beneath a bee
A bee beside a pound coin is small. A bee beside a bacterium is enormous.
Begin with something visible on a flower and keep shrinking. A 15-millimetre worker bee leads into pollen, the thickness of a human hair, a two-micrometre bacterium and a 100-nanometre virus particle. The same insect moves from small to gigantic without changing size once.
Read the bee story →Available comparisons
bee vs uk pound
pollen vs hair
bee vs bacterium
virus vs bacterium
Story idea
Things that are much bigger than they look
An A380 on a football pitch, a jumbo jet beside a container ship and two Eiffel Towers that still fall short.
Huge objects often look manageable because we see them from far away. Put an A380 on a football pitch, a 747 beside a 400-metre container ship and the Eiffel Tower beside Burj Khalifa, and the missing scale cues come back very quickly.
Read the big-things story →Available comparisons
airbus a380 vs football pitch
cargo ship vs boeing 747
burj khalifa vs eiffel tower
Story idea
Animals you wouldn’t want to stand beside
A shark, crocodile, elephant and giraffe, each beside the same 1.75-metre person.
Use one human figure as a fixed ruler and four familiar animals change character. The shark stretches away, the crocodile spreads along the ground, the elephant’s shoulder sits overhead and the giraffe keeps climbing. It is a simple way to show why one measurement rarely tells the whole story of an animal.
Read the animal story →Available comparisons
great white shark vs human
crocodile vs human
human vs elephant
human vs giraffe
Something just happened
Give the news a ruler.
Asteroid. Iceberg. New fossil. Rocket. Ship. Telescope. Building. Animal. If a physical size is part of the story, a comparison can often make the number useful.
Send the measurement, the source and the deadline. If the subject fits Just How Big?, we can work from the existing comparison library or build a new visual around it.
Ask about a bespoke comparisonEditorial use
Using a Just How Big? visual
Want to reproduce one of the graphics? Email us with the publication, article and asset you need. We will confirm the appropriate file or embed and the credit line.
Please keep scale labels and explanatory context intact, and do not redraw, relabel or crop away information that changes the meaning of the comparison without checking with us first.
Suggested credit line: Graphic: Just How Big?
Where possible, link the credit to the relevant Just How Big? story or comparison.
Interactive comparisons should use the supplied embed rather than an iframe of the full Just How Big? page.
About
About Just How Big?
Just How Big? is an independent visual science project about physical scale. It combines structured measurements, sourced comparisons, interactive tools, games and educational material to make unfamiliar sizes easier to understand.
Contact
Have a story in mind?
Send the subject, publication and what you need. A link to the draft or published story is useful if you have one.
alex@justhowbig.com